In a chilling move, the Government has announced that it wants to ban the former bosses of MG Rover from ever running businesses again.

The bosses, it’s reported, walked away from Rover with £42 of bonuses and pensions (presumably as part of the deal to sell it).

However you feel about the morality of claiming this money from a failing business, banning them from business for it? They’ve committed no crime here and they’ve not been declared bankrupt.

What possible legal grounds would the Government have? Presumably none – the announcement is their way of getting some populist crap into what they think will be a big story. Yet, if they’re successful, this will set a precedent that you can be banned from owning or running a business by the ‘court of public opinion’.

To make this story worse, on the radio I heard someone say that the £42 million was not the cause of the Rover’s collapse, rather it was the lack of Government intervention when the ‘workers’ needed it.

They’re all wrong. What killed Rover were shoddy, undesirable cars that were overpriced.